Thursday, August 02, 2012

Mitt Romney continues to be the target of a low, unsourced, unfounded attack from Harry Reid. I feel really, really bad about that.

No, actually, I don't.

...In an interview published Tuesday, Reid said an investor in Bain Capital, the former private equity firm of the Republican presidential candidate, told him in a phone call that Romney had paid zero taxes....

On Wednesday, Reid stuck to his story, and broadened it.

"I am not basing this on some figment of my imagination," Reid said in a telephone call with Nevada reporters. "I have had a number of people tell me that."

Asked to elaborate on his sources, Reid declined. "No, that's the best you're going to get from me."

...A Romney spokesman said Reid's charge was baseless and below the belt....

Poor Mitt. Logic tells us that Reid couldn't possibly have heard this from multiple sources, so he's just blowing smoke. And yet, even if it's a lie, Reid's put Romney on the spot, because what he's saying sounds plausible to a lot of people.

Y'know, it's a bit like saying that the current president is a secret Muslim socialist who lied about his U.S. birth and has a fake Social Security number and is secretly plotting to take away all privately owned guns if he's reelected, either before or after he finishes the job of deliberately destroying American capitalism. It's also a bit like saying that the previous Democratic president was a drug dealing serial murderer and rapist whose lesbian wife had her male lover killed when she wasn't hanging sex toys on the White House Christmas tree.

It's almost like that. The difference is that Romney's not facing an ever-expanding list of accusations, most of them truly grotesque and preposterous, many of them of a felonious or treasonous nature, spread by multiple prominent rumormongers over the course of years, and believed in every particular by roughly a third of the country. Hell, what he's being charged with isn't even illegal.

But still, welcome to our world, Mitt. Now you have a vague sense of how Democrats feel all the time.

****

UPDATE: What it would really be like if Mitt Romney were a Democrat, via BooMan.

18 comments:

I suspect it might be for real--partly because Rovian, slimy hardball seems to me very out of character for Reid--and partly because I think a lot of people who worked with Romney probably concluded that he was a colossal dick. So is it really unbelievable that more than one person might have shared this allegation (whether true or not) with Reid? I'm not sure it is.

I did get one thing wrong: acc. to Reid, his first alleged source was a Bain investor, rather than a colleague--so someone less likely to be privy to Romney's tax information. Still I find this astonishing coming from Reid.

The difference here, IMO, is that Reid's allegations are most likely true or close to it. Romney, "astute businessman" that he is, would have done everything possible to minimize his tax bill. Given that his income is almost entirely from investments, the most he would have paid without any deductions, loopholes, offshore accounts, etc. would be 15%, right? Getting that number down to 10, 5, or 0 isn't really a stretch. Big corporations ("are people, my friend") do it all the time.

Reid is taking one for the team to make sure the tax issue stays front and center in the public consciousness.

And I can see a Bain investor being privy to such information, figuring that Mitt might well have boasted to such folks about how he eluded paying any taxes -- after all, wouldn't all his peers want to do the same, and look up to someone who'd pulled it off? For Pete's sake, he could even use it as a selling point to get their investment money -- "See how shrewd with money I am?"

Reid's accusation (which I too find entirely plausible) reminds me of an old Tx pol story. A candidate tells his manager to spread around the rumor that his opponent is (insert your favorite epithet here). The manager, a bit of a naif, responds, "We can't do that. We have absolutely no proof of it!" The candidate answers, "So what? Let that SOB prove it ain't so."

Let Mitty prove he paid some taxes, like Harry said. All he has to do is you-know-what.

C'mon, Victor, we're better than that, or we should be. Lord knows there's enough and more than enough to bash Romney with, without diving into that sort of cesspool. Leave it to the Breitbarts of the world.

And how different is this from accusing Hillary and Bill Clinton of all sorts of nefarious things, of everything from lesbianism to drug running to murder; and John Kerry, a decorated war hero, of being something else - a traitorous coward; and Barack Obama as being some African-born Communist/Socialist/Fascist?

I get you, my friend, but your last line sums up why we really shouldn't wade into that swamp, even in jest. Fighting lies and smears with truth, even snark, is good; behaving the same way, even just joking (and you just know the Other Side will glom onto stuff like that as proof that We're All Evil) -- well, it just leaves a bad taste.

Maybe that's because I'm a woman, and a lesbian, and a horse owner, and I've encountered enough Catherine-the-Great crap as it is without running into it among friends. Clueless-about-this friends, but friends.